The increase in the availability of Internet Protocol (IP) and mobile communications services has presented new avenues for the distribution of advertising content to the market place.
However, the shear volume of advertising that permeates across these communications services e.g. spam or other unsolicited promotional material has resulted in the average user becoming somewhat desensitised to such on-line marketing material.
To improve the effectiveness of these new media campaigns, targeting is often employed. In essence targeting simply directs relevant content to desired demographic groups based on information contained in a subscriber profile. One such use of targeting content to subscribers is discussed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,298,348 to Eldering.
Under the system of Eldering, a consumer profile is developed and updated based on information relating to their purchasing history. The purchasing records for a consumer are transmitted to the consumer profiling system of Eldering, which then updates the consumer profiles based on product characterizations which include demographic profiles of the typical purchaser of that product, as well as the product brand and size. The consumer profiles can be accessed by advertisers, who then transmit information characterizing their ads to the system of Eldering. The ad information is then correlated with the consumer profile to produce a measure of the applicability of the ad to that consumer.
Another example of the use of targeting is discussed in Published US Patent Application No. 20080248809 to Gower. The system of Gower provides activity based information for a given location to subscribers. The virtual location of Gower may be considered as being a virtual location defined in terms of activity or activities being performed at the location. Consequently the virtual location may be an actual physical or geographical location, or it may be defined solely according to the services provided therein, for example a virtual location may be defined by a WiFi identifier which could change its physical location.
The activity based information provided by the system of Gower can be utilised by new devices entering the virtual location, or devices already in the virtual location, to reconfigure themselves, dependent on the activities being performed by other devices in the virtual location. For example, if the virtual location is associated with a library, this may result in a lot of wireless connections being established to download the library's information index, and this activity based information could be used to automatically present the user of a device entering the virtual location with an option to do the same activity.
A further example of the use of targeting in the delivery of content is discussed in US Patent Publication No 20080288354 to Flinn et al. Flinn concerns a computer-based systems architecture in which users may be represented directly within the system based on their usage behaviours. The system of Flinn captures usage information from one or more users interacting with the system and then categorizes, and clusters the captured usage information to model usage behaviours of the one or more users. In addition the usage behaviour of the recipient Flinn also takes into consideration advertising recipient's location this may be the recipient's current location or one or more historical locations.
One example of the use of the system and method of Flinn is the provision of advertising. In such instances the system of Flinn automatically determines the desired advertising recipient's location. In addition to the location determination the system of Flinn also incorporates the recipient's inferences of preferences derived from usage behaviours to direct appropriate content to the recipient.
While the above systems provide improvements over the standard mass broadcast paradigm they can still result in unnecessary or unwanted network traffic. This is particularly the case in mobile communication systems where there is some overlap between cell coverage i.e. a subscriber could be in two or more network locations simultaneously. Accordingly there is a need for the provision of a profiling system and method that can account for the movement of a subscriber within a network to enable the delivery of targeted content to a subscriber. Furthermore it would be advantageous to provide a system and method for the delivery of content that further enhances content conversion and which does not impose undue burden on existing network infrastructure.